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First time accepted submitter jscheib writes "According to Will Oremus in Slate, a report released today finds that 'New York City could slash its emissions by a whopping 90 percent by 2050 without any radical new technologies, without cutting back on creature comforts, and maybe even without breaking its budget.' The key elements are insulating buildings to cut energy needs, converting to (mostly) electric equipment, and then using carbon-free electricity to supply the small amount of energy still needed. Oremus notes that including energy savings would reduce the net price tag to something more like $20 billion."

I would. Dropping 10% of the entire US consumption would have a significant world impact on Pollution. Unfortunately it would also drive the price of oil down which would increase consumption in the 3rd world.

In Detroit. The population's gone from 1M to 800k in twenty years, and energy consumption has plummeted. New York can emulate this success just by continuing it's current direction.

Yup. I live a little over an hour away from Detroit (thank goodness!).

Want to see what over 40 years of total Liberal/Progressive Democrat and labor union control (Detroit was actually the centerpiece of the Democrat Progressive "Model Cities" program...Google it) looks like?

Clearly the statist has failed all these years because Obama has not yet had a chance to lead, and even now the evil Republicans still are blocking any chance at real reform and *progress*. We should just let Obama do whatever he wants for a few years, the Constitution be damned, and that will solve everything.

Of course I am being sarcastic but you do understand that there are people out there who really think this is true.

New York is located close to the Atlantic ocean and that's one decent heatsink, so by pumping out excess heat in the summer into the ocean would be more efficient in two steps - less heat put out in the city, and the temperature difference when doing heat pumping will be lower which can result in lower costs. The disadvantage here is that a lot of pipes needs to be laid down for central cooling in addition to central heating.

New York is located close to the Atlantic ocean and that's one decent heatsink, so by pumping out excess heat in the summer into the ocean would be more efficient in two steps - less heat put out in the city, and the temperature difference when doing heat pumping will be lower which can result in lower costs. The disadvantage here is that a lot of pipes needs to be laid down for central cooling in addition to central heating.

Of course, pumping all that heat into the Atlantic ocean won't have any climatic or ecological implications, right?

Of course new technologies will make it possible to reduce emissions, possibly even by 100%, but anyone claiming to plan these things 37 years into the future is full of it. Read some Ray Kurzweil [wikipedia.org] books to get some perspective - maybe he's too optimistic, and then again maybe he isn't. By that time we could definitely have StarTrams [wikipedia.org], asteroid mining, SBSP [wikipedia.org], space nuclear, space antimatter, who knows...

Cutting CO2 mainly depends on technology (or cutting the standard of living, which most people don't want to do), aimed at two areas:

1) Non-emitting cars. Electric cars look more viable every day; it's not inconceivable that most people could be driving them by by 2050.
2) Power generation. Whether it comes from coal sequestration or my preferred solution, nuclear [slashdot.org] fusion [imgur.com], cutting CO2 relies on improvements in power generation technology.

1) In large metropolitan areas going all electric cars is very realistic in a few decades. The average trip is likely very very short and therefore very amenable to all electric cars. In rural areas it will take probably take longer and be more difficult because the average trip length is much longer (and the farm equipment may never convert, but if that is the only thing burning fossil fuel it probably wouldn't matter). I wouldn't be surprised if there is an order of magnitude difference or more in the

By "large" balsy2001 seems to mean "large, densely packed population". NY City is very densely packed and that is definitely an aid to trip distance and time reduction. Unfortunately for both the US and Australia large is almost always synonymous with sprawling when it comes to cities. Coupled with "transport infrastructure" being a euphemism for "bare minimum road network for private vehicles" there's little hope that mass public transport can come to the rescue.

How much of that time is idling in traffic? Electric cars should have a very low draw when idle. It's not so much the duration of your trip that matters but the distance. If you're driving an hour to and from work at the speed limit, then you're not within Melbourne's city limits, you're coming in from the suburbs.

How much of that time is idling in traffic? Electric cars should have a very low draw when idle. It's not so much the duration of your trip that matters but the distance. If you're driving an hour to and from work at the speed limit, then you're not within Melbourne's city limits, you're coming in from the suburbs.

Stop and go eats batteries, having to constantly accelerate to get back up to speed is much more draining than crusing. Crowded cities devour batteries. Distance matters but traffic matters more, an hour in stop and go traffic will wipe your charge and refilling a battery is still not as simple as filling a tank.

It depends on the situation but I don't I don't think an hour in stop and go traffic will deplete the batteries of even current generation electric cars (see http://auto.howstuffworks.com/can-electric-cars-survive-major-traffic-jams.htm [howstuffworks.com]). The Nissan leaf normally has a 100 mile radius, under ideal conditions that wouldn't have covered the round trip commute for my last job, 56 miles (I lived out west in the mountains and there was no traffic). The link states that stop and go traffic on a cold day reduced

I live in Melbourne, Australia and commute an hour to and from work. This is normal. This is a city of only 3. something million. A city 5 times ours I'm sure has longer commute times.

Where do you pull this idea that trips are short?

3 millions if you think of "The Greater Melbourne" (that is including the suburbs) - which means a "city" radius of about 50 km.
However, if you refer to "the City of Melbourne" (aka CBD; let's take the inner suburbs as well = max 10 km radius), I fail to see how commuting to/from work takes an hour each way.

Current figures (greater melbourne, wikipedia) have more than 4miliion.

Your definition of the city of Melbourne extending only to 10 km is moot as a fair number of people commute each day along suburban train lines, a number of which in the E/SE extend beyond 35km from the CBD. And not just workers heading into the city - Try studying at La Trobe or Monash unis by a combination of bus, tram or train and see how long one's cross-town journey takes...

You see, though, the context is "the New York City" with Capital c. Yes, I know, they are 8mils+, but the land area they live on is 789 sq.km (if it would be a circle, the radius of the circle would be only about 16 km. About 28 km side if a perfect square). And in regards with the transportation, it is the "size" as in distance that matter, not the size of its population.

Hard to compare. Melbourne has what I consider a somewhat average public transport system, a 10km trip could be an hour long commute by either public transport or peak hour traffic. Melbourne while it's a big city is not very dense at all. A large portion of the population lives in suburban houses typical of most Australian cities. Apartment living isn't quite as widespread in Australian living.

To put some numbers to this claim:Melbourne population density: ~4000 people/sq miNew York City population density

You are right and that is more what I was thinking. However, when I lived in DC, I had a near 1 hours commute that amounted to less than 20 miles. Another apartment I lived at the drive home was between 45 minutes and 1 hours 15 minutes and it was like 7 miles. I had colleagues in DC that used electric cars that did very well in the 1+ hour commute of stop and go traffic. When I lived in a mountain state away from big cities and metropolitan areas I commuted 1 hours 15 minutes but covered 56 miles, each way. It was also not uncommon for us to drive a few hundred miles in a day on the weekend.

you seem to have forgotten:
3) Conserving energy. By insulating houses and replacing ineffective systems it is relatively easy to save a lot of energy (and thereby CO2) without a negative impact on the standard of living. Actually good insulation improves living standards more often than not.
The problem here is that stuff like this needs investments (which pay off after a few years though). Rental houses will need some encouragement to do this, because the owner (the one paying for insulation) does not (d

for a large city like new york another possible energy source is its own waste. and i dont just mean the barges of garbage. I mean the sewage from the largely ancient system under their streets, many parts of which is are no longer mapped or maintained (lost records), that dump into the river/bay. i know its not practical at this point to compeltely update/upgrade underground public works in an old old city like New York. but if they could trap as much sewage as possible, and turn and use it in a biofuel po

Actually there are massive savings to be made by making buildings more efficient. The Empire State Building massively cut its energy usage as part of a renovation that paid for itself in under five years.

There was a Japanese office building on the TV that had smart blinds which adjusted the angle of the slats during the day to reflect as much light as possible into the rooms. It also had LED lights that adjusted themselves automatically do that light levels throughout remained constant, supplemented by sunl

it's simply about insulation. Buildings and houses can save 90% of energy used by simply insulating things like attics and walls. Boring I know.

I don't know about New York, but most houses in the UK are already insulated up to the hilt. There may be another 5% to gain if you add another yard of insulation, but it is diminishing returns. 90% less? (Do they really mean using only one tenth the energy they do now?) - no way! Even starting from a base of no insulation (like my parents' house did) there was no-where near a 90% gain. More like 30%

To get 90% gain you would need to knock all buildings down and start with something fundamentally diff

A lot of UK housing stock is pretty dismal for insulation. For example, Victorian homes generally have walls which are a single layer of brick with no possibility for cavity insulation, and the original, single-pane sash windows. The house I live in has a maid's room built into the roof and it's just not possible to fit loft insulation either.

Fixing this really requires new build to a good standard. New building regs are coming in 2016 which will require all new homes to be zero carbon. In other words, th

> You can use nuclear fuel to get electricity, but what do you do with the left-overs?

You run it through a breeder reactor, recursively wring about 6,000% as much total energy from it as you'd get from a single run, and end up with a much, much smaller volume of waste to warehouse.

It's kind of like cleaning up a hoarder's mess by throwing out only the uncontested garbage, expired food, and animal feces, scrubbing everything else down, setting aside high-value items for immediate sale on eBay, and packing

As a lifelong rural inhabitant, I've always been amazed, whenever I've visited NYC, at just how energy-inefficient many of the buildings are. Single-pane windows, little insulation, baseboard heaters, drafty weatherstripping, the works. I've been there when it's been blazingly hot, and again when it's been bitterly cold, and in both cases the standard solution seems to be to just crank the environmental controls to max. When you split wood in the summer for heat in the winter you quickly develop a respect f

It may have to do with the age of the buildings. For example, energy efficient windows are not a large incremental cost for new construction, but is a fairly decent expenditure on older construction. The cost payback for windows is typically very long in single family homes (I don't know about condos etc.). I know insulation in a single family home is very easy to install and has a good pay back rate (again I don't know about doing it for condos etc.). Weather stripping and sealing are cheap and easy to

When you split wood in the summer for heat in the winter you quickly develop a respect for how quickly those little inefficiencies add up, and you do something about them.

And believe me, that respect increases when you find out that you did not split enough wood in summer and have to grab your axe and do some chopping in the freezing cold, as I found out last week. Ok, I wouldn't have had to, since I got oil heating to, but given the relative cost of oil and wood, I very much prefer to run the oil burner at a minimum. Also, a huge-ass tiled stove in the living room simply rocks.

That's what they achieved when they retrofitted [rmi.org] the Empire State Building. Paid for itself in only 3 years, and now delivers $4.4M savings annually.

Insulation, smart energy controls etc do cost money, but the energy savings can more than pay [rmi.org] for it over the life of the building. Better designs can save up to 69% of energy costs. And there's a lot of ripple-effect savings too, by reducing emissions and freeing up capital.

Of course, getting completely off coal, oil & gas will eventually cut emissions to zero, but there's a more immediate & guaranteed payoff simply by improving efficiencies.

38% is the low hanging fruit. To take an existing building to higher inefficiencies gets exponentially harder and there may be a point that it is impossible to improve upon and still have the building functional. Sure new buildings can have very high inefficiencies but it will take a very long time to rebuild NY City.

Sealing a building's envelope might pay for itself if you look only at energy cost, but it's NOT necessarily consequence-free. Just ask anybody who owns a home built before 1970, superinsulated sometime later, and would now end up classified as an EPA biohazard zone due to mold if someone were ever to do an official test with legal consequences inside. Or anybody who owns a house built in the 1980s or 1990s that gets its roof or exterior damaged by a hurricane or tornado, ends up with water infiltration, an

One of the things they mention in there is insulation. It's a bit hard to insulate big glass windows, which new york has a lot of. Yes you can double pane them and even (very expensively) vacuum the middle but they still transfer heat pretty well.

Unless of course you got rid of those windows, but they said without removing any creature comforts. I don't know about anybody else, but sunlight fits into my definition of a creature comfort.

I stayed at a really fancy hotel in NYC, where enormous amounts of money had been spent on interior decoration. But the windows were single glass windows which let through a lot of cold and noise. You cannot buy such bad windows in many European countries. Why do they not install proper triple-glass windows? I have not seen any building in NY with proper windows. Do they not sell them in the US?

My house is full of single pane, leaky windows. I'd love to replace the windows but a) the mortgage is still underwater b) I could only afford to replace 1 or 2 per year, and c) my neighborhood association would complain that I'm lowering the value of their property in our "Historical Neighborhood". (yes, seriously)

I'd love some of those German multipane windows that open two ways....they are awesome, but I'd have to import them and my neighbors would throw a fit.

Screw the HOA. IANAL, and we just bought our first house (like you said, naive first time, learned a lot...never again shall i be fooled).But seriously, scrwe the HOA. IMO they dont get to dictate that my house should suck and waste money just because they are worried about thier values. father had trouble with HOA's growing up too. Similar thing, we had a bigger lot on the circle than most, due the shape of the surrounding lots, etc etc. Fther decided to put up a shed. Not just a prefab home depot thing, n

This is why some rather simple fixes to the mortgage system, which could have been done as part of fixing the financial crisis, would allow people to borrow money for reducing energy retrofit. Instead Obama was busy being a Republicans and the Republicans were busy being crazy. Then we get to the libertarians, who were, and statistically speaking are, still in denial about climate change. It isn't that price signals could not be used to fix the problem, it is that the people who were, and are, profiting fro

In the UK we have a scheme where you can borrow the money to make improvements like installing triple glazing and pay it back over a very long time (say 20 years) through your energy bills. Since the improvements save more money than the monthly cost of the subsidized loan your bill actually goes down, and your home gets more pleasant to live in.

A green policy that improves quality of life. The only problem is that it is too socialist for some countries.

It obviously wasn't cost-effective to do the replacement. You can buy anything in NYC, but remember, much of NYC is heated by steam thrown off as a by-product of other industries. Did your "really fancy" hotel have steam heat?

Every kind of window imaginable is available. But the rule of thumb to use when it comes to understanding energy efficiency building codes in the US is the owner usually gets to decided the cost/benefit ratio and buy accordingly.

Codes are set at a state and local level, so some are better than others. Which makes sense. Heating and cooling requirements in Hawaii are negligible compared to Minnesota or Arizona. Climates and microclimates mean that even two towns next to each other may have radically diff

Everybody sensible already knows you can, but people are afraid of investments. Of course insulation pays back quite soon but people are afraid of investments.
The only ones who can really help are banks. They could lower mortgages on well insulated houses. 1% is a big incentive.

Because the people who are paying the operating costs aren't the ones building the buildings. Banks wouldn't have to slash their mortgage profits, instead interest rates for non-green buildings would be higher, thus shifting the burden back on to the people who made. This is Pigou "taxing bads."

Banks wouldn't have to slash their mortgage profits, instead interest rates for non-green buildings would be higher

Unless the higher rates were forced by regulations, this would never happen. The banks charging higher rates for mortgages on less-efficient buildings would be immediately undercut by other banks, and buyers would go where the rates are lowest. Mortgage lending is an extremely competitive industry.

For that matter, even if higher rates were forced by regulations, the system would have to be watched very closely because banks would benefit from selling the higher-rate mortgages, so competition would push th

Because the people who are paying the operating costs aren't the ones building the buildings.

Like hell they aren't. The people who pay the operating costs are the ones who buy the buildings, and if you think operating costs aren't a factor when people evaluate a property purchase, especially a commercial property purchase, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Everybody sensible already knows you can, but people are afraid of investments. Of course insulation pays back quite soon but people are afraid of investments.

Nonsense.

People aren't afraid of investments. Business, to a first approximation, is nothing but investment: "How should I employ my available resources to generate the best return?".

If the expected rate of return on an investment in insulation is better than the return obtainable by putting the same money elsewhere, then businesses will install insulation. If they don't, it's usually because it's not the best return they can get.

The example of the Empire State building isn't a good one, because the i

What, exactly, is the zero carbon source of electricity that could power NYC?

As I read the criteria "creature comforts" I take that to mean there would still be buses and taxis, presumably running on electricity (ignoring for the moment that cabs run 24x7 and have no real window for battery charging), heating and air conditioning would keep everyone warm or cool, and that Times Square would not go dark, the stock market will still be run out of NYC, etc.

...the answer is no. Not that it isn't technically possible. It almost certainly is, but the collective will required for such a change, and to no small degree the collective will of those that oppose such a change, makes it virtually impossible.

I founded an award-winning startup a couple years ago whose software tells you what your potential energy savings are, using only your street address and zipcode as inputs, so I've been tracking developments like this closely. What the experts call "sealing the envelope of the building," or thoroughly insulating the structure, does give you the biggest bang for the buck (although the ROI for triple-paned windows, as the article suggests, just isn't there). But that's not terribly sexy because once the ins

The key, says the Urban Green Council&#226;&#8364;(TM)s executive director, Russell Unger, is that the city must begin to view buildings as infrastructure, like roads and sewers, rather than simply as private property.

I tend to see them as private property-- because they are. As much as I support green energy, I oppose increasing government power. I find the use of government to impose regulation on the people when not in the interest of defending the rights and safety of others to be immoral.

First thing I noticed was the Insulating Buildings.Glibly thrown out there like it's cheap, quick, or even possible in a city the size of New York with a bazillion buildings of various ages.It takes 6 months on a small two story building, and could take 6 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for any building over 20 floors.

Just to be clear - the full refit cost a lot, but the incremental added cost of improving energy efficiency had a three-year payoff. Timing the efficiency upgrades to be done in conjunction with necessary building refits can save a lot of money.

According to this document [esbtour.com] the retrofit will reduce "consumption of watts and BTUs by a guaranteed 38.4%". Not quite 90%. That would require changing the steam plant and electricity production.

Scaffolding, applying 6+ inches of insulation boards (glued and secured with "nails") on all outer walls, weather protection, paint job, remove scaffold.
It's not exactly witchcraft. And I have seen it done a few dozens of time. The roof is somewhat harder (depending on shape), but still nothing a skilled contractor shouldn't be able to pull off rather quickly. Take a look at countries where there are financial incentives (like cheap credits) for insulating houses. 6 months is twice the time the Chinese est

You reckon? One reasons for renewable power working well in Germany: they also started to build in a "energy efficient manner and insulate the old buildings. Here's why [efficiency...rmany.info]:

German building stock currently consumes approximately three to (in the worse cases) ten times as much energy for heating as new builds.

Loans/mortgages for insulating buildings would be a win-win situation for the case of older ones. (if you start insulating some buildings, the money saved on energy can be used for insulating others... I think Bloomberg could even choose to offer "0 rate loans/returnable subsidies" from the city budget...).

Obviously we don't need to reduce energy consumption to zero, just emissions. And it's inevitable that we'll switch to 100% renewable energy eventually, by definition - non-renewable energy isn't renewed, and will run out (or just get too expensive to use).

Nice diagram, though it's 39 quadrillion BTUs, not 39%. Still, 40% of $280B total electricity cost would be $39B annually; a pretty significant savings. But it's more than that, because thermal efficiencies result in a lot of savings from gas & oil heating too.

But it's unrelated to the issue of fossil fuels. Efficiency gains reduce and delay the impact of CO2 emissions, but transitioning our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels will still have to happen sooner or later, even if only to maintain

We might also move to 100% green energy if we carpet the entire surface of the earth with solar cells. Until people reduce and make their own efforts to reduce there energy needs through economic (if you don't save on costs or get paid, it is not reasonable to ask people to change their habits) means then it wont work.

You would only need to cover some percentage of desert area (not even all of it: do a computation using the solar constant [wikipedia.org], total world energy production [enerdata.net] and assume only 12% conversion efficiency for PV - you'll be surprised of how low the percentage of the world surface would need to be covered by PV-es. I've done this computation in the past). The only engineering problem is the transport of the energy around the globe.

That may be true, but you seem to have missed the point of the rebuttal. It's completely unnecessary to "carpet the entire surface of the earth" with panels.

I've done the math before as well, and it's a very small percentage (around 0.1%) of the earth's surface required to produce all the electricity needs of the planet with PV panels, or a little under 1% to produce ALL the energy needs of the planet.

That would be a decidedly non-trivial undertaking. Though The same effect could be achieved over a long p